Your video settings have changed
by Eliah Hecht 
May 20th 2009 at 11:00AM
Upon patching and opening up WoW today, many players were greeted with the only marginally helpful message "Your video settings have changed." The first question that leapt to my mind when I saw it was "what settings, and why?" It would have been nice to tell us that, I think.
Fortunately, Bornakk knows (I sometimes suspect he knows everything, with that manly beard of his). The answer is that the Projected Textures option, in Video Effects, now defaults to on. I assume players that had it turned off - like myself - had it turned on for us. What the option does is display things like the rune circles for Blizzard and Rain of Fire, which many players were confused to find disappear when patch 3.1 hit. So if you're wondering what the change was, or wondering why you suddenly see spell details that you didn't before, now you know.
Filed under: Patches
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
JPN May 20th 2009 11:08AM
I do have a question - my fuzzy "drunk" effect doesn't work anymore. I turned a lot of settings down to compensate for my crappy graphics card. (GEForce 6800) What setting in the video options would help it come back on?
Rugus May 20th 2009 11:13AM
Your glorious 6800 is a pretty good card, I've been a happy 6800Le owner and worked very good on WoW. Much better than most of the graphic adapters installed on laptops (MacBook anyone?) where sometimes you crawl at 2-4fps in Dalaran (at least on my MacBook that has 1 year).
mibluvr13 May 20th 2009 11:25AM
That would be "Full-Screen Glow Effect". It's useful to uncheck this when you get smashed right before a pull.
Xanwryn May 21st 2009 12:23AM
Drunken fights own with the glow effect on! TRY IT. DUEL DRUNK!
Shaibachan May 20th 2009 11:16AM
That would explain why Consecration disappeared around that time.
Sagacyte May 20th 2009 11:16AM
I also noticed the Particle setting were pushed all the way up. I play with it low (my fps go down otherwise), so I noticed the undesired increase. Easy to fix, weird to understand.
Hwnn May 20th 2009 11:22AM
Projected textures is a particularly important setting for the Hodir fight. Without it, it becomes very difficult to dodge falling icicles. The small blue circle that indicates where an icicle will drop doesn't show up if projected textures is turned off.
Eternauta May 20th 2009 11:22AM
I already had that option turned on. Does this mean they turned it off?
Damn this is so confusing :S
Kura May 20th 2009 11:54AM
When I logged in I was greeted with the rather bizarre"Your video settings have not changed" message.
I thought "Wow...thats nice to know, THANKS BLIZZARD!"
Arashikou May 20th 2009 3:00PM
Before 3.1, this setting was controlled by the Spell Detail slider. Many people had spell detail set high enough that this was turned on.
In 3.1, it was given its own control, but instead of defaulting to ON or having the value be based on what it was set to previously, it defaulted to OFF for everyone, resulting in many people who don't tweak their graphics settings losing all the ground effects in-game. People in the know (or who read the article about it on WoW Insider) went and turned it back on.
In 3.1.2, to alleviate confusion, the default was changed to ON. If you had it on already, it is still on. If you had it off already, it is now on, but you can turn it off if you really MEANT to have it off for performance reasons.
More subtly, what data is written to your WTF file has changed, but that's not something you really need to worry about.
blakex May 20th 2009 11:23AM
The odd thing is, they're displaying this alert to everyone - even those of us who had Projected Textures already turned on. A bit confusing.
peagle May 20th 2009 11:54AM
^ This. Already had everything on, sat there for 5 minutes trying to decode a change that hadn't been made.
Faust May 20th 2009 11:30AM
Anyone who didn't have Projected Textures on and was raiding deserved to die in the fires they invariably stood in anyhow. Thank god this change might put an end to some of it though.
Elathil May 20th 2009 12:20PM
I was raiding with Projected Textures off because I'd switch my video quality settings down as low as I could.
I could see the glowy places of death just fine. Any time I got caught in one, it was 100% me paying more attention to the boss's health and my dots than the ground, and that only happened once.
Sothe May 20th 2009 1:17PM
Sorry, but not all of us need a crutch like that to be able to see an avoid fires.
Some of us can actually pay attention!
Thander May 20th 2009 2:32PM
Well I disagree Sothe because there are some fights where there is no visual indication other than the ground texture. This makes it impossible to dodge until after it has already hit, so you might take a lot of damage until you can react.
Thebum May 20th 2009 7:30PM
And on a fight like Hodir it's almost impossible to avoid the falling ice without the setting turned on because you can't see how big an area the falling snow covers.
Stephen May 20th 2009 11:33AM
It also appears that chat settings have changed. I logged in and guild, whisper, and system messages were no longer checked.
Laynne May 20th 2009 11:51AM
I logged in last night and found that my quest tracking settings had changed. The quest objectives box wasn't docked to my screen anymore, and I was able to move it and change its settings. I wonder if this just happened to me or it was a bug. I found the game really buggy last night - was trying to level my warlock in Ashenvale; went to attack a mob and he completely disappeared, but kept attacking me. I had to run away to get him to stop. Every time I went back to that place to try to finish my quest, he would attack me, but was nowhere to be seen. Drain Soul would also keep casting after a mob was dead. At least it looked cool :)
Arashikou May 20th 2009 3:13PM
I, too, had the advanced quest tracking box turn itself on (and all of its settings reset, including making it appear on hover) last night. Very peculiar.